I note that Kasich has been flooding the New Hampshire
airwaves
with ads over the past few weeks. I've also seen some Chris
Christie commercials. Maybe the other candidates have been
scheduling their ads during Big Bang Theory reruns or something,
but I haven't noticed them.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), a possible contender for the 2016 Republican
presidential nomination, invoked a dubious Abraham Lincoln quote while
criticizing President Barack Obama's plan to raise taxes on the wealthy
during an interview on "Fox News Sunday."

“You cannot build a little guy up by tearing a big guy down,” Kasich
said. “Abraham Lincoln said it then, and he’s right.”

TPM attributes this quote to William Boetcker (1873-1962),
an American religious leader, it being (more or less) one of his "Ten Cannots", published
in 1916. Which are:

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.

You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.

You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.

You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage
payer.

You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.

You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your
income.

You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class
hatred.

You cannot establish security on borrowed money.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away man's
initiative and independence.

You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what
they could and should do for themselves.

These were published in a leaflet, titled "Lincoln on private property",
which did include Lincoln quotes. But number two was from
Boetcker's brain, and
people
shouldn't attribute it, or any of the other nine, to Lincoln.

On the other hand, none of those things are any less true because
Lincoln didn't say them. If you know what I mean.

[For a table-turner, see Andrew
Ferguson on Al Gore's deployment of an equally bogus Lincoln quote.]

Hillary is always good for an obvious phony op. After giving her
premiere speech on climate change in Des Moines, where she bemoaned
the usage of fossil fuels releasing gigatons of CO2 into the
atmosphere, which will kill us all dead…

She climbed into a private
jet to whoosh off to her next gig. It's estimated that the 19-seat
Dassault model Falcon 900B burns 347 gallons of fuel per hour.

ZiL lanes (also sometimes called "Chaika
lanes") are lanes on some principal roads in Moscow dedicated to vehicles carrying senior
government officials. Known officially in Russian as rezervniye
polosy ("reserved lanes"), they took their nickname from the
black limousines produced by ZiL and
the luxury Chaika cars that were used by officials of
the Soviet Union as their official vehicles.
... The ZiL lanes and restricted routes caused considerable
disruption to Moscow's traffic because of the absolute priority given to
their users.

Apt!

You might have heard that, in criticizing
the Iran nuke deal, Mike Huckabee compared Obama to Hitler.
A number of MSMites echoed the meme, giving it credibility.
Only problem is, says Jonah
Goldberg: that interpretation is clearly at odds with
what Huckabee actually said.

Now, I’ve never been a big fan of Huckabee’s style of politics — or
policy. But a remotely fair reading of the statement strongly suggests
that Huckabee was comparing Obama to Neville Chamberlain or some other
member of the “Hitler is a man we can do business with” school. That’s
the point of calling Obama “naive” for trusting the Iranians — the
Hitler in Huckabee’s analogy.

Clear enough, right?

As a long-time Internet denizen (around on Usenet when
Godwin's Law
was first uttered), I'm aware that
Nazi analogies and other
reductio
ad Hitlerum arguments is a sign of the
shutdown of higher thought processes.
I'm far from sure that comparing Obama/Kerry to famous Hitler appeasers
is that sort of thing.

Minions

Truth be told, I could have waited for the DVD, but (on the other hand)
I chuckled all the way through.

This is an origin tale of sorts for the
Minions, first seen in the Despicable Me movies. We
are treated to their Darwinian evolution: a species
inordinately attracted to evil bullies of whatever stripe,
to offer assistance in whatever schemes they devise.
Minions aren't evil themselves, mind you. Nevertheless,
it's fortunate
that they are so inept that their minionitic assistance more often
than not works to the doom of their villainous masters.

Their disastrous service to a would-be world conqueror in the nineteenth
century leads them to decades of arctic exile. Their society
stagnates without servitude to some wrongdoer, so in 1968 they send
forth three brave souls (Kevin, Bob, Steve) out into civilization
to find a new bad guy to sign up with. This leads to many
adventures, but eventually settles down to work for Scarlett Overkill
(Sandra Bullock) and a plot to steal Queen Elizabeth's crown.

I wonder how they reproduce. Do they reproduce? They
all seem to be males, at least they have male names. But they
don't seem to have … well, from what we can see, they're pretty
smooth all over. They're very tough, perhaps they are immortal.

UNH Takes Down Bias-Free Language Guide

As I guessed might happen yesterday,
the University Near Here made its "Bias-Free Language Guide"
unavailable for web viewing early this morning.

The associate vice president for community, equity and diversity removed
the webpage this morning after a meeting with President Huddleston. The
president fully supports efforts to encourage inclusivity and diversity
on our campuses. He does not believe the guide was in any way helpful in
achieving those goals. Speech guides or codes have no place at any
American university.

I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall at that meeting.
For people who missed what all the fuss was about, the pre-fuss version
of the Guide is memorialized at the Internet
Archive Wayback Machine.

An article in my local paper, Foster's Daily Democrat, quotes
the president further:

While Huddleston said he respected the right of individuals on campus to
express themselves, he said that the “First Amendment is paramount and
key to” the University of New Hampshire.

So, a happy ending? Well, I figured I might point out the obvious
in a letter to Foster's:

In the wake of the massive unfavorable publicity and ridicule
stirred up by the University of New Hampshire's
"Bias-Free Language Guide",
it was good to see UNH's
President Mark Huddleston take a forthright
stand in favor of the First Amendment, and make a commitment to
"free and unfettered" speech on campus. The bizarre and arrogant
guide is now absent from the UNH web server.

I hope President Huddleston follows through on his
First Amendment enthusiasm by taking
one more step: The Foundation for
Individual Rights in education (FIRE) has long classified UNH as a "red light"
school, for having "at least one policy that both clearly and
substantially restricts freedom of speech." (https://www.thefire.org/schools/university-of-new-hampshire/).
That's at least as embarrassing as the Bias-Free Language Guide.

This shouldn't be hard to remedy: just in New Hampshire,
both Dartmouth and Plymouth State have been granted "green light"
ratings by FIRE. UNH should strive for the same.

[Note: UNH President Huddleston is, according to the Portland
Press Herald, "troubled
and offended" by the BFLG. Can you hear the sound of our local
Social Justice Warriors being thrown under the bus?
So who knows how long it's going to
hang around on our website? Better check it out while you can.]

It's always fun to have one's employer mercilessly mocked, but
I'm not sure anyone's taken the trouble to point out: this is not
new. The
Internet Archive Wayback Machine has versions of the same URL
going back to September
2013. And almost all of the stuff that people are (laughing|shaking
their heads)
at today has been there since then.

Example: The item that many find most amusing is the guide's
deeming the use of "American" to refer to United States citizenry
to be "Problematic". But that's been in there right along, as near
as I can tell. Yes, it's stupid. But UNH is consistently
stupid. (Or, I guess I should say: consistently cognitively disabled.)

Not to say there haven't been changes. The 2013 section titled "SEXUAL
ORIENTATION" has been broadened; it's now "SEXUAL ORIENTATION AND
GENDER IDENTITY", wouldn't want to leave that out;
there are a couple of new terms in that section's
glossary: "gender expression" and "gender identity". (Not the same
thing, buddy, and don't you forget it.)

Some changes are mysterious: in 2013, "preferred" ways
to address a group of humans were "Folks, Peeps, People, You All,
Y’all". All acceptable ways to avoid the dread "Problematic/Outdated"
term "Guys".

But here we are in 2015, and "Peeps" has vanished from the "preferred"
list. But neither has it appeared in the "problematic" list. It has been
consigned to the Memory Hole, no doubt by some editor who had a bad
reaction to a marshmallow peep over Easter.

There are some obvious absurdities, probably inevitable when
a document is group-edited by peeps who score high on
feeling/thinking ratio. For example: if you refer to someone with no
disabilities
as "healthy", that is considered "problematic".
But this is a mere few paragraphs
after claiming that following the BFLG will "create a healthy, more
productive classroom culture or work environment." [emphasis added]

What is the innocent reader to think? "Healthy" is OK when you use it as
a metaphor, but not to refer to objective reality?

There's more. Much more. If your sport is shooting fish in a barrel,
have at it.

But to mention one last thing, the proffered justification for the BFLG is
especially egregious: "Starting a Conversation about Word Choice".
Presented with the usual who-could-be-against-that framing?

But "conversation" here should be taken in the progressive sense: the
one where you listen to us lecture on the current
enlightened dogma about matters racial, sexual, and political. After
which you will adjust your expression accordingly, or risk
being labeled a heretic against UNH's official "value" of "diversity".

Enemy

As I'm sure I've noted before: Mrs. Salad's Netflix picks tend to the
offbeat and bizarre. Sometimes based on nothing more than (in this
case): "I like Jake Gyllenhaal". Downside: you wind up watching
movies like this sometimes. It was named "Best Canadian Film of the
Year"
at the Toronto Film Critics Association Awards, but truth be told,
it might have been a slow year for movies up there.

Spoilers ahead, probably. Adam is a college history prof, who
tells his bored students about Hegel's historicism, which
Marx abbreviated to "first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
(He's shown saying this twice—heh!). But while watching
an obscure DVD movie, Adam notes a bit-part actor who is
literally his double. It's Anthony, who's shown to be a dissolute,
disagreeable jerk and pervert. Adam and Anthony eventually
meet, and before you can say:
"nothing good can come of this", it doesn't.

Keep your eye on the spiders, folks.

Problem: like many pretentiously arty movies, this one has endless
(but pointless) shots of scenery (especially the ugly Brutalist
architecture of Adam's school), Gyllenhaal-as-Adam wandering around looking
lost and moody, tricky lighting,
and the like. Cut those out, trim some of the gratuitous
nudity, and you've got a pretty good 60-minute episode of Night
Gallery with room for commercials.

If Not Us, Who?

I got this as a freebie for renewing my subscription to National
Review awhile back. (You can only have so many NR t-shirts
or coffee mugs.) And it finally percolated to the top of my to-be-read
pile. Written by David B. Frisk,
it is a hefty tome, 438 pages of text, over 60 pages of endnotes.

And what's it about?
It is a biography of William A. Rusher (1923-2011), the publisher of
National Review for about thirty of those years, from 1957 until
his retirement in 1988. In addition to his work at the magazine, Rusher
was also a political activist, heavily involved in an effort
to steer the Republican Party to a more consistently
conservative direction. Although his early GOP efforts were in
support of Dewey and Ike, he came around to a solid conservatism
after being disillusioned with the Eisenhower presidency.

Rusher was considerably different
from NR's famous editor, William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley was
born rich, comfortable moving in sophisticated society, totally
charming. Rusher was from a modest background, working his way into
Harvard Law, very much the practical politician, obsessed with
devising winning strategies. WFB was the golden
retriever in the limo, Rusher
the pitbull in the street.

It's surprising things worked as well as they did at the magazine.
Frisk does a good job of describing the inner wangling factions
at NR, often setting Rusher at odds not only with WFB, but
also with such eminences as James Burnham. There were disagreements
aplenty: what the overall tone of the magazine should be; which
political candidates should be supported, which dumped; just how
dismissive should the magazine be toward conspiracy theorists,
anti-Semites, and other fringe-dwellers. (Shrinking the tent of
acceptability is fine in theory, but once you start factoring
in the loss of subscribers, contributors, and advertisers, it
gets more difficult.)

Rusher was a huge Goldwater fan in the early 1960s, a major force
pushing him into his 1964 presidential candidacy. Frisk reminds
us that, like any sane person would be, Goldwater was unenthusiastic about
running. He seems only to have embraced the process when it was clear
he wouldn't win.

But the Goldwater campaign was successful at beating the liberal
Republicans, and it hatched the political career of conservatism's
most shining success, Ronald Reagan. Rusher was an active participant
there too. He never liked Nixon much, and wanted Reagan to be the
nominee in 1968.

Outside of politics, well… there wasn't much there to Rusher.
Never married, a few close friends. Obviously his choice, but somewhat
sad.

I can't recommend this book to anyone who isn't really interested
in the history of the US conservative political movement. At times it
seems that there's no memo so inconsequential, no squabble so trivial,
that Frisk doesn't describe it. Still, it's readable, and will act
as a lasting memory to someone who undoubtedly had a major effect
on his times.

Is the Carolina Pregnancy Center, as Rachel claimed, falsely "designed to look
like they provide abortions to patients"? Well, you have to be
pretty oblivious to get that impression.
In fact, if you can't figure it out from their
home page,
you have to travel one
mere mouseclick from there
to learn that they "do not offer, recommend, or refer for abortions."

“I’m very proud of the fact that he speaks Brooklyn, because he’s not a
phony, and that shows,” said Marty Alpert, who used to cheer for Mr.
Sanders when he was on the track team at James Madison High School,
where she is now on the alumni board.

As a matter of fact, on a bunch of recent issues, Paul has been very
close to other, more-consciously conservative Republican candidates than
to any vision of libertarianism. His response to the murder of a San
Francisco woman by an illegal immigrant, for instance, was to denounce
"Sanctuary
Cities" and support an onerous
surveillance program. He's against the Iran
deal. While he was quick to call for yanking the Confederate battle
flag from public grounds, he was slow-to-never in challenging Donald
Trump's moronic view of Mexican immigrants as mostly criminal or to
issue a statement about the Supreme Court's ruling on gay marriage (he
eventually said he wants to privatize marriage). Earlier in the year, he
supported more defense spending than a couple of GOP hawks (albeit, Paul
wanted to pay for the increases with offsets elsewhere in the
budget).

Big surprise: when you blur your branding enough to blend in with the
other candidates, you don't give anyone any special reason to vote
for you.

Huckabee said that Trump has “struck a nerve with people,” and “I’ll be
honest with you, a lot of the things that he’s saying, those are things
that, in many ways, I’ve been saying those for eight years, before he
was a Republican. Things like talking about how China has cheated.
Talking about how there is this Wall Street-to-Washington axis of power
that grinds out jobs against Americans. I mean, these are themes that
I’ve been talking about. But, let me say this, if you put as much air in
my balloon, not just you, but if all the media, will pump the air in my
balloon, as has been pumped into Donald Trump’s balloon, I’ll be leading
the pack as well.”

Thanks be to Huck for reminding us that there's more than one know-nothing
demagogic populist on the GOP side.

Manhattan Melodrama

Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, William Powell. While I suppose it would be
possible for those people to make an unwatchable movie, this isn't it.

Gable and Powell play Blackie and Jim, respectively. They are literally
boyhood chums. A tragic riverboat fire bonds them for life, but they
take divergent paths: Jim becomes a crusading attorney, destined to
root out organized crime and corruption, while Blackie adopts the path
of a gentleman gangster, with a slightly off-kilter sense of honor
about him.

Myrna Loy, lovely as always, is Eleanor,
initially Blackie's moll, but won away (literally) overnight by Jim,
as she realizes Blackie's essential disreputableness, and is charmed
by Jim's honorable intentions and traditional values.

All this—well, you see the title—sets up inevitable conflict
driven by a contrived plot. And it's all pretty good stuff,
because those three can make anything believable, and make you
care about how things are going to turn out.

Under the Skin

Looking over the reviews, it seems that this is one of those
love-it-or-hate-it polarizing flicks. I would bet on a bimodal
distribution of user ratings. I come down on the side of "arty,
pretentious junk", sorry to the filmmakers.

It did, however, win at the Golden Schmoes Awards
for "Trippiest Movie of the Year". So maybe take that as a suggestion as
to what you need to ingest to make the movie watchable.

Scarlett Johansson plays (according to IMDB) "The Female".
In cooperation with a motorcyclist, she dons the clothes of a
recently-deceased woman, gets made up at a local store, and sets
off on her mission.
Which seems to involve
enticing lonely Scottish guys back to her lair where they
(under her alien spell) sink into a large dark pool and dissolve.
After a few rounds of this, she seems confused and
wanders off. But things eventually come to an unsatisfying
and ambiguous conclusion.

This is apparently your go-to movie for Scarlett Johansson nudity. But,
trust me, it's arty/dark enough to remove any titillation factor.
And in between there are more than enough pointless (but seemingly
endless) shots of drab Scottish scenery.

The Phony Campaign — 2015-07-19 Update

The fickle oddsmakers at PredictWise
have dropped Christie and Biden below our 2% threshold, but behold!
Mike Huckabee has arisen to take their place. This is Huck's first
appearance in the poll, and he's already in a solid second place:

Because this is Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is a vulgar
anti-intellect who cannot string a coherent paragraph together, his full
statement contradicts itself several times within 57
short words.

If you need reminding of just how dead wrong Trump was, check out the
whole thing.

Pun Salad is no fan of McCain as a person or politician. As noted back in
March
2008: he's a jerk. And note that Trump's comment was in the wake
of McCain's accusation
that Trump had "fired up the crazies" in a Phoenix rally. Referring
to thousands of McCain's own constituents.

Pun Salad did not enjoy Star Trek season 3 much, but wishes for
a solution to the McCain/Trump brawl similar to the episode
"Let
That Be Your Last Battlefield": beam them both down to a desolate
planet, let them fight it out, while the rest of us move along at warp
speed.

The NYTreported
on the doin's of man-of-the-people Bernie
Sanders last weekend:

[…] Mr. Sanders quietly stepped off the campaign trail this weekend to visit
Martha’s Vineyard, a favorite summer destination of the country’s elite,
in order to mix with representatives of some of the same interests he
inveighs against in his stump speech.

Mr. Sanders attended the annual Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee
fund-raiser on the Massachusetts island, a popular gathering that draws
some of the most prominent business lobbyists and fund-raisers in the
Democratic Party.

A "prominent attendee" was anonymously quoted as saying that Bernie's
presence at the affair (which had a $37K admission fee) "suggested he
was more pragmatic than his rhetoric would let on."

Pragmatic? That's an interesting way to spell "phony". (See the
Weekly Standard for a funny poster.)

Reuters reports
that computer algorithms used by analytics firms to harvest
data from social media
are flummoxed by "sarcasm and mockery". And—you see where this
is going—that's a particular problem for political campaigns using
those results to target advertising dollars. Example:

Haystaq, a predictive analysis firm, examined Tweets containing the
expression “classy” and found 72 percent of them used it in a positive
way. But when used near the name of Republican presidential candidate
Donald Trump, around three quarters of tweets citing "classy" were
negative.

Martin O'Malley hasn't cracked the 2% barrier at PredictWise lately,
but we'll blog about him anyway. In just a few hours timespan:

O'Malley made a horrific
gaffe at the left-wing Netroots Nation conference by saying: "Black
lives matter, white lives matter, all lives matter." The last two
phrases departed from the current Progressive Holy Writ enough to get
him booed off the stage.